Introduction to Statistical Methods
Department of Educational Psychology
Probability helps us contextualize inferential statistical results as having some amount of confidence that our results occurred not simply due to chance
Probability underlies many decisions we make intuitively
Let’s dive more into the different types of data
Qualitative data come from a more descriptive (via words or classification)
Quantitative data is something represent by an amount or numeric measurement
It is normal and expected that, if we take two different samples of a population, we can and will find that they have somewhat different characteristics
However, if these are both believed to be representative samples, they should become more similar as they become larger
Proper use of statistics will help us control for the fact that our samples naturally vary
Earlier, we gave some examples of how to describe different variables as qualitative, quantitative, discrete, continuous, etc.
We’ll introduce some other terms to help us classify our variables, which will be essential when we treat it
| Gender | Frequency | Relative Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Men | 18 | 0.45 |
| Women | 22 | 0.55 |
| Total | 40 | 1.00 |
Using statistics with our data first starts with properly understanding and identifying our variables, and their scales of measurements
Sampling plays an important role in how representative our data is of the population of interest, which, in turn, helps establish whether our results are generalizable or not
Probability is at the core of analyses, and helps us establish the likelihood of events occurring, which we will be revisiting later
Module 1 Lecture - Sampling and Data || Introduction to Statistical Methods